Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Massive Entertainment / Ubisoft

I was commissioned for a series of wildlife sound recording expeditions to three countries to capture original audio for the open-world game Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

The expeditions took me to remote Halmahera, West Papua, and Borneo, as well as across Australia, where I recorded birds, frogs and insects in the outback, the tropics and Tasmania.

Recording for Pandora’s biomes
Pandora is divided into distinct biomes, and these shaped how I approached the expeditions. Each trip was planned around the habitats and the sound qualities the team was after, targeting the species, textures and atmospheres that would suit each environment.

Capturing clean, isolated recordings of single individuals was key to this project, and it’s a technique I’ve spent years refining. Recording the sounds of one individual bird, frog or insect takes careful planning, technical skill and a lot of patience. Much of the work went into tailoring my approach to tracking down each target species and recording its vocalisations, drawing on a variety of recording methods and field skills.